Shades of Gray
by DezoPenguin
Summary: When Shido confronts a night breed that has infiltrated a street gang, he believes the matter has come to an end, but purely human hearts may provide more lingering problems than those born in darkness.
1. Default Chapter

"At least have the courage to die with dignity," Tatsuhiko Shido snapped as his quarry bolted around the corner. The vampire detective really didn't expect the night breed to accept his challenge--most were cowardly creatures at heart--but it didn't hurt to try. Every so often he encountered one that was as stupid and prideful as it was vicious and cruel.

_All right, then, I'll just have to do it the hard way._

The bloodsword was hot and bright in his hand as he gave chase, a slash of crimson light in the shadowy alleys. The night breeds' protean nature corrupted the human bodies they possessed; pierced organs and broken bones would do nothing to a form that had become a supernatural menace. Even a vampire's strength could not injure them easily. And a breed's natural form had no fundamental physical structure to harm at all. That rarely bothered Shido. A vampire's power, its magic, was in its blood, and he had been taught to use that blood as a weapon. Certainly, the bloodsword could inflict physical harm, but against the breeds it was Shido's own magic that mattered.

He all but came flying around the corner. It was a dead end, between two tenements and backed against a warehouse. There would be no escape for the night breed.

Only, there was a complication. The alley was occupied. At the far end a fire burned in an old oil drum. Two young men in ragged jeans and nylon jackets warmed their hands at it. Perfect human hostages for the breed to use to save its life.

"Kill him!" the breed keened. "Kill the NOS freak!"

The two teens spun towards Shido and pulled out guns, one a heavy automatic from a shoulder holster and the other a little Saturday night special he'd shoved down the front of his pants in the world's most dangerous form of Russian roulette.

Shido hadn't seen that coming.

They ran towards him, put their bodies between himself and the breed while leveling their guns. With their jackets hanging open, Shido could see that they both wore black T-shirts blazed with the name and logo of an American rock group. He understood, now; the breed, or rather its human host, wore the same shirt. It was the "colors" used to mark a local street gang. Of the breed's victims, six had been members of a rival gang; that was how the NOS's Yayoi Matsunaga had tracked the breed to this area. A breed's first kills often were those hated by its host.

That the other gang members were protecting the breed, though, was still surprising. They could clearly see it was a monster, its conical head inky black but for a single three-lobed red eye and two narrow slashes of red mouth, each fang-lined, the breed's arms ending in clusters of eight writhing tentacles each instead of hands. These humans, though, would protect it, even try to kill for it.

Gunshots rang out, most ricocheting off the brick walls or the alley pavement. One punched through Shido's abdomen on the lower right side, but did considerably more damage to the vampire's suit than to Shido himself. The bangers couldn't hurt him with their little toys. He was more worried about _his_ hurting _them._ They might have chosen the wrong side, given over to the darkness, but they were still human, not blood-sucking leeches or soultaking breeds. Any carelessness on his part could make him use too much force and kill or cripple the young men--boys, really.

Closing to the two men, he slapped out with the bloodsword, its flat smacking the barrel of the .45 and knocking the gun away across the alley. A second later his shoulder crashed into the second banger's chest, sending him over backwards to hit hard and stay down. While the still-conscious man was trying to figure out what was happening, Shido's foot came up in a scything kick to the side of the head. He'd pulled the force, but it was still enough to put the would-be cop killer down on his back.

"Are we through with the games, yet?" he asked the breed angrily. He'd never yet met one with the slightest respect for human life, and it never failed to enrage him.

"You're no NOS agent," the breed roared, its two mouths speaking in unison and making its voice sound eerily strange, a chorus of itself.

"Indeed; what gave it away?"

But, of course it wasn't _that_ obvious. Unlike the night breeds, whose monstrous forms clearly marked them as what they were when they weren't hidden within a human host, vampires were hardly distinguishable from humanity. Shido could have been any handsome young man with his long, nearly white hair, in his neat suit, string tie, overcoat, and scarf. Even as Shido let his vampirism show, it was really very little. Small, though distinct fangs for canine teeth. Eyes that turned from sea-foam green to glowing golden with vertically-slit pupils. Nothing that couldn't be concealed by dark glasses and keeping his lips closed. Still, it was enough for those who understood.

"A vampire!" the breed howled. "Why would a fellow dweller of the night hunt me?"

Shido almost didn't bother responding. They never understood, these night breeds. Perhaps they couldn't. Unlike the vampires, they had never been human once, so a human heart wasn't something they could cherish.

"You've killed eight people, brought your evil into the light with you. You've dragged a human soul into the dark."

"What have I done? I've hurt no one that this boy did not want to kill. I've made this human world no worse than it was. Perhaps I've even saved lives, by not risking the friends of this body in combat."

"Don't try to justify your crimes!" Shido snapped back, but inside him something quailed. Sometimes a breed could seduce a human into the darkness, but sometimes a human went looking on his or her own.

Those were the worst of all, when the breed and host worked together towards a common end. The banger's soul would do nothing to weaken the breed.

"Human hearts belong in the light," Shido said, speaking not to the breed but the human host, "but if you invite a demon inside, the you bind yourself to the darkness."

He shifted his grip on the bloodsword and sprang at the breed. The creature was ready for him, though, sweeping its tentacled arms up. Instead of attempting to parry the sword, it instead went low, after his legs. Shido tried to twist away in mid-jump but he wasn't quite fast enough; tentacles whipped him below the knees and knocked him off-course. A desperation slash missed the breed entirely and he hit the alley pavement.

Reflexively, Shido brought the sword up in a defensive stance as he regained his balance. The tentacles on the breed's other hand were altering, the soft tips of each reshaping into pointed chitinous barbs. Then those tips launched towards Shido, the tentacles suddenly elongating, turning three-foot octopus arms into twenty-foot spears. He jumped, and the attack passed beneath him, spearpoints cracking and gouging the filthy asphalt.

Shido hurled the bloodsword in midair; it flew out in a whirling crescent that slashed through the extended spears. The severed portions dissolved into stinking sludge, while what was left retracted at once. The breed staggered back, howling in paid, while the sword arced back to Shido's hand.

_Time to finish this._

He released the bloodsword with his hand but more importantly with his will; it reverted at once to being merely blood, which dripped to the ground and hissed away to nothingness. Shido then lifted his hand to his mouth and pierced his finger with his fangs. Droplets of blood welled up, quickly growing, merging together, and elongating into a whip which he lashed out at his enemy. The bloodwhip covered the distance between them even faster than Shido's vampiric speed could have and twined around its body. Held fast by the vampire's power as much as the whip's physical restraint, no shapeshifting tricks could let it slip free. Shido summoned the power that slept in his blood, sent it through the whip and into the night breed, immolating it in blue flame. Now it had only two choices: abandon its host and try to escape in its natural form, or remain with the stolen body and die. Shido had seen breeds choose both.

This one did neither. Even as it shuddered in pain, it opened its upper mouth and gushed a stream of fire at the vampire. Shido saw the flames well up in its maw just in time to dodge, but he couldn't move and maintain the whip at the same time.

_Damn! I didn't expect it could do that! This isn't your run-of-the-mill breed._

The recovery time was fast, too; it slapped out with its unhurt hand, its tentacles extending but this time as whips instead of spears, ad lashed Shido's side, slamming him into the warehouse wall at the back of the alley. Its lower mouth opened and followed up with a gout of not ice, as Shido would have expected, but crackling blue-white lightning that crashed into him. Pain surged through the vampire as he was knocked off his feet, sent sprawling onto his back.

Shido hadn't survived centuries as a night walker, though, by being easily stopped by pain and injury. He'd learned the lesson that he had to fight on through the pain.

_Make your enemy stop you,_ he remembered Cain telling him in that sibilant, silken voice. _Do not do his job for him by letting him defeat your will while your body can still act._

While the breed hesitated, seeing the vampire down, before following up with another lash, Shido brought his finger to his mouth again, once more called forth the bloodsword, and sprang up, the blade extended spearlike before him. His injured body ached, begged not to be put through the effort, but he ignored the pain and struck, the sword's tip piercing the monster's side.

Even inside a human host, the existence of a night breed was supernatural rather than biological, but the power of a vampire's blood was more than enough to destroy one. Shido could feel the energies in his sword surge into the body of the breed, destroying its possession. The corpse of the gang leader it had bought the soul of slumped to the pavement. From its mouth, a black ichor oozed, slipping out onto the asphalt. The weakened breed was trying to escape its now-useless host, but a single droplet of Shido's blood was enough to finish that. The ichor glowed with a blue flame, then congealed into a fine gray ash that blew away.

With a long, regretful sigh, Shido looked down at the dead young man. He looked barely older than Riho Yamazaki had when Shido...

Staring at the corpse of a boy who'd sold his soul to darkness for the sake of the power to kill his rivals in a criminal underworld, who'd wasted everything life had offered him, Shido found that he did not want to think about Riho.

_I'm becoming maudlin in my old age,_ he sighed with mock regret, then turned and began to make his way out of the warren of alleys. Yayoi would be glad to know their case was resolved, and she was always willing to share some of her blood. He could use it, too, to help heal his injuries. It wasn't the worst he'd been hurt, not by a long stretch, but he still needed attention. Without taking blood he'd be weakened, vulnerable.

Perhaps that was why he did not realize that, though the two bangers he'd felled were still where they'd landed, unmoving, the eyes of one were open and following his every move.


	2. Chapter 2

I

"A vampire," Nabuo said dryly. To say that he and the rest of the gang-those who hadn't been picked up in the police sweep-were unimpressed by Toshi's story was an understatement. "Exactly what have you been smoking, Toshi?"

"I'm serious! C'mon, what's so hard to believe about it, anyway?"

"This is the twenty-first century, Toshi," Gentaro protested.

"He killed Hiro," Toshi pointed out. "That ought to tell you something right there. And Hiro _called_ him a vampire. That's what he said." He rounded on Ken, whom he'd expected some support from. "C'mon, Ken, you were _there_. You saw the guy."

"Well..." Ken mused"he _did_ have that freaky sword thing."

"And he knocked you out with one kick, too! Does that sound like some normal guy?"

"That's a point there, too," Ken said. He prided himself on being a tough guy, and it was almost easier to accept that he'd been taken down by a vampire than that an ordinary cop had so easily brushed him aside.

"And really, what's so hard about believing in vampires? Hiro...he was real, right? He made a bargain with a demon and that was for real!"

_That_ was the undeniable truth. Their gang had been losing out on a nasty turf war until their leader had found that old book, tried that spell-and something answered.

"That's one thing, but vampires? Dracula and 'I vant to suck your blood' and all that?"

"This wasn't Bela whatshisname in an opera cape and tux, Nabuo. He killed Hiro, killed our leader just when we were going to off those lousy Black Oni once and for all!"

"Okay, okay," Gentaro gave up. "He was a vampire, all right, Toshi? But what difference does that make?"

"He killed our boss. It's one thing if he was a cop, but he's just a stinking outsider. Vampire or not, he can't just come in and take out one of us."

The others looked at him in stunned surprise. Gentaro and Ken kept that look, that kind of "What are you, nuts?" thing, but Nabuo's started to melt into the kind of anger Toshi felt.

"You want us, the four of us, to go try and take out that guy?" Ken protested. "Toshi, he killed Hiro! He took us both down in what, half a second? How can we-"

Toshi didn't even let him finish whining.

"He's a vampire, right? It's like Nabuo said, there's only, like, a zillion movies and books and TV shows and manga about them. It ain't like he's some freak we never heard of."

He could tell he was starting to get through to them.

"So we're gonna find this guy and bang! Come high noon, he gets it right through the heart!"

II

"The breed actually said that?" Yayoi asked. "About not killing any more people than its human host would have?"

"He did."

"Boy, that one had some nerve," snorted Guni. Shido looked up at her and reflected that, in a city where night breeds were almost less of a problem than some humans, a green-skinned manikin with demonic-looking dragon wings was a much more appropriate appearance for a fairy than some storybook elf with the glistening wings of a dragonfly would have been. As was her sarcastic attitude, come to think of it.

"It isn't true, you know," Yayoi said gently. The beautiful NOS agent could see how upset he was. She'd probably noticed the night before when he'd made his report.

"Oh?"

"This isn't New York or Los Angeles, Shido. Yes, there's crime and gang activity, but they don't often devolve into mass murder. Remember that the whole reason the NOS became involved in this case was the _unusual_ nature and number of deaths."

"Or just because some punk kid wants to be a big nasty gang boss doesn't mean he could or would have done it without the breed pulling his strings," Guni put in her version as she flitted over to Yayoi with a cup of coffee.

"Thanks, Guni. Where's Riho, though?"

"Shido sent her out on some errand. The little idiot probably burst into flames in the sun, knowing her."

Yayoi glanced at Shido, seeking clarification.

"I sent her to pick up a few books from the library. She needs the practice in being out alone during the daytime. She left during the morning, she'll be inside researching while the sun is up, and she'll come back during the early evening before sunset." The more diffuse sunlight of dawn and dusk was irritating to vampires, but unlike sustained, direct light not harmful.

"How is she coming along?"

Shido shrugged.

"It's difficult for her to cope with some of the changes, but she's doing better. You know Riho; when she sets her mind to something she goes after it one hundred percent. She's very determined."

"Obsessive would be a better word."

"You're just cranky because you had to make the coffee, Guni," Yayoi pointed out.

"Okay, that's true, but still..."

Yayoi laughed, then rested her hand lightly on Shido's shoulder.

"I have to get back to work. Don't worry, Shido. I know you want to save humans from the darkness, but there's nothing you can do if they step into it of their own will. Be happy for the people that breed won't be killing tonight, thanks to you."

"Thanks for stopping by, Yayoi." A yawn suddenly welled up within him.

"And get some sleep! Fighting breeds at night and wrestling with philosophical musings in the morning tires a man out."

"You know, there are more pleasant ways to tire a person out."

Yayoi laughed.

"Save it for when Riho gets back and you can watch her blush."

There was more truth in that then he cared to admit.

III

"His name it Tatsuhiko Shido" Ken announced.

"How'd you find that out?" asked Nabuo.

"One of the cops the NOS had working the cleanup crew wasn't too picky about where his cash came from." He rubbed his fingertips together. "I remembered him 'cause Hiro used to pay him off regularly."

"So how'd he know the vampire's name?"

"Saw him talking with the NOS agent who was running the op. She was a real babe, so he paid pretty close attention. The guy's name, like I said, is Tatsuhiko Shido, and he's a private eye."

Gentaro laughed mockingly.

"A vampire P.I.? What is this, a bad movie?"

"Sure, and just like all Dracula movies, the vamp's gonna get it right through the heart before the credits roll." Toshi spilled a set of hand-carved wooden stakes onto the concrete floor of the old factory.

"If he's got a job, is his address in the phone book?" Nabuo asked Ken.

"Yep; I got it right here."

"Good work, Ken," Toshi said. "You got the address, Gentaro got that old furnace up and running, I got the stakes and tools, and Nabuo picked up some silver crosses and garlic."

"So what's the plan?"

"We go to this guy's place, we bust in, we bring his sleeping body back here, and we do like the books say. Stake through the heart, saw off the head, stuff the mouth with garlic, and burn it all to ash. Teach that undead freak to mess with us, hey?"

IV

Even with sunglasses on, Riho Yamazaki found the world to be more than a little blurry, as if she was actually looking through prescription lenses meant for someone else's eyes. Taking the glasses off would just make it worse, though.

_Concentrate, Riho!_ she told herself. _Mr. Shido can do this, and you don't want to let him down, right?_

"Still having trouble putting one foot in front of the other?"

"I'll put one foot into your backside!" Riho shot back reflexively. Most of her conversations with Guni went that way. Then she realized what was going on. "Hey, Guni, what are you doing here?"

Guni darted into Riho's hair before passerby could see and start wondering what an eight-inch-tall, green-skinned fairy was doing talking to a girl on the street.

"Shido went to bed for the day. There's nothing more boring than sitting around listening to a vampire snore. Yayoi stopped by earlier, and that was fun."

Guni chuckled meaningfully, but Riho refused to rise to the bait. She'd been terribly jealous of Yayoi once, when she'd believed Yayoi and Shido were involved, but now of course she knew it was strictly friendship, with a little vampire-blood donor kinkiness added in.

_Wait a second. I drink Ms. Yayoi's blood, too._ Well, that just proved there was nothing romantic going on. But then again, Yayoi seemed to really...enjoy...having her blood taken. So did that mean that Shido and Yayoi were... And that she and Yayoi were _also_... Or did it have nothing to do with...that...at all?

_Being a vampire is so confusing! But I'm really glad I can be with Mr. Shido now forever._

Except that they weren't really "together." Not as a couple.

Now she _was_ blushing.

"Uh, Riho, you were supposed to turn left a block ago," Guni observed.

V

"You'd think a P.I. would at least have a decent lock on his door," Nabuo muttered.

"Quit complaining. We're in, aren't we?" Toshi groused. The tan coveralls he was wearing itched; he didn't see how real delivery guys could wear them every day. Still, if anyone saw them carrying a box-or coffin-out of Shido's office, it made for a good disguise. "Halloween party prop, ma'am. Just taking it back to the company," or "Just picking up a package for delivery, sir."

"The place looks empty. Shouldn't there be some kind of human guard on hand while he's asleep?"

"If there is, he'll get what's coming to him." Toshi patted the gun under his coveralls. Garlic and crosses and stakes were one thing, but for some Renfield guy, good old-fashioned bullets would do the trick just fine.

The place looked more like an apartment than a business office. The main room had the usual desk and chairs, with a large bookshelf for easy reference, but off to one side there was a kitchen, if a little understocked. Another door was closed, so Toshi opened it.

"Jackpot!" A big ebony coffin sat there.

"Why do vampires sleep in these things?"

"Ask someone who cares, Ken. C'mon, let's get it out of here. No, wait. We ought to check his case files, see if he left anything to point his NOS friends back to us."

"Cop said that NOS agent was a real hotty. Figure a vampire to get the pretty ones. Getting your blood sucked must really feel good."

"Yeah, well, let's move this along, 'cause I don't want to find out. I want this guy staked, sliced, and burnt by sunset."

"Ken, since you've got the time to run off at the mouth, why don't you stay here and check his files?" Nabuo suggested. "Meet us back at the factory."

"If you work fast enough, you might even get back in time to see the main event." Toshi grinned cruelly. "I wonder if he'll scream as much as they do in the movies. I want this bastard to hurt for what he did to us."


	3. Chapter 3

I

The white panel truck nearly hit Riho on its way out of the parking lot. She barely jumped back in time, only belatedly realizing that she'd leapt all the way across the street to land poised in a pantherlike crouch. Her hindbrain was screaming threat-response messages like "Kill it! Tear it apart!"

Vampire instincts were sometimes scary.

"Geez, I'm glad no one was around to see that, Riho. Why not pick up a car and fling it next time? It wouldn't be any more obvious. Though where that guy got his license from, I can't imagine."

Riho smoothed down her skirt. She had to learn better control of herself, if she was ever going to be a useful partner instead of a glorified office clerk. Shido needed to be able to count on her!

They went upstairs to the office, where Riho was surprised to see they had a visitor, a young man in a delivery driver's coveralls and cap.

"Can I he" she started, but the _-lp you?_ was cut off when she realized the man was rooting through Shido's desk. "Hey, you, what do you think you're doing?"

II

Ken straightened up suddenly at the girl's voice; he hadn't even heard her come in. Fetching little thing, sixteen or so, though with the kind of cute face that would always look young so she might actually be older than she seemed. Her hair was long, done up in a blue ribbon and let fall in a waist-length foxtail. She had on a kind of Gothy red skirt with a spiderweb pattern but the bright yellow underdress made her look brighter and happier.

Cute.

"Looks like I got lucky by staying behind after all" he said, taking out his gun. "I guess you're the bloodsucker's receptionist or something? Show me where he keeps his case records and maybe you won't get what we're giving your boss."

"What have you done to Mr. Shido?"

"I'd be thinking more about what I'm gonna do to you if you don't cooperate, girl."

She was across the room and on him before he even had time to think, let alone fire. One of her hands grabbed his wrist and nearly broke it wrenching the gun away. The other seized him by the throat, lifted him up off his feet, and slammed him into the wall.

_"What have you done to Mr. Shido?"_

Her eyes were glowing gold and inhuman; every time her mouth opened to speak he saw fangs. Ken fished his cross out of his pocket and shoved it in her face. She completely ignored it and bounced him off the wall again.

_"Tell me where he is!"_ she screamed.

It took roughly five minutes for her to wrench out the information of who, what, where, and why. As Shido had pointed out, when Riho wanted something, she was a very determined girl.

III

_  
Please answer, please answer!_ Riho thought as the phone rang. After the third buzz, there was a sharp click.

"Matsunaga here."

"Ms. Yayoi, thank goodness!"

"Riho, is that you?"

"You've got to help Mr. Shido! The gang members who were working with that breed from last night came back and kidnapped him while he was asleep! They're going to kill him for revenge."

Instantly Yayoi was all business, dropping her usual flirtatious pose.

"Do you know where they've taken him? How many there are?"

"It's an abandoned factory they use as a hideout." She gave Yayoi the address. "There should be three gang members there."

"All right. You're between me and the factory, so I'll pick you up on the way. Be downstairs, though, because I'm not going to waste time waiting."

"Yes, Ms. Yayoi."

"You ought to have her call an ambulance for our fearless vampire hunter, here" Guni remarked. "It's not like I care or anything, but he's going to make a mess of the rug."

IV

"It's gonna be sunset in another half hour or so" Toshi declared.

"Where the hell is Ken, anyway?" Gentaro asked. He'd stayed behind to keep an eye on the furnace, which was as touchy as it was old. Already its flames were giving more light than the sun, which could be seen only dimly through the small, high, dirty windows and skylights.

"Wimp's probably staying behind on purpose," Nabuo said. "I doubt he's got the stomach for this."

"Maybe there was a silent alarm and the cops got him."

"All the more reason to do this _now,_" Toshi declared. He turned to the bench where he'd set out the tools of the trade: stake, hammer, a bag of garlic, and a rusty hand saw. The leaping flames cast weird shadows across the instruments of murder as he picked up a stake.

Shido's sleep was troubled.

_The humans are our prey, Shido,"_ Cain's deep, silken voice echoed through his mind. _"Your foolish empathy cannot change that. Can a lion put on horns and become a gazelle?"_

_"I still have a human heart."_

Cain's laughter, rich and deep.

_"A human heart? What is that? A weak thing, driven by fear or by love to one irrational act after another. It is our place to prey on them, but they prey on themselves by choice. You should be glad the 'human heart' you speak of is only your own delusion."_

He saw the night breed he'd last killed howling from its two mouths.

_"Kill him! Kill the NOS freak!"_

He saw the two young men raise their guns and start firing at once, without a doubt or a second thought.

_"I've hurt no one that this boy did not want to kill."_

Then Yayoi: _"I know you want to save humans from the darkness, but there's nothing you can do if they step into it of their own will."_

Of their own will.

Like Riho. She'd begged him to take her blood, to make her like him. She'd wanted it so badly, and because she'd been bleeding out from the wound Cain had inflicted, he'd given in, brought her into the darkness with him. For all his talk about people meeting and parting, losing her would have torn a hole in his spirit.

What would happen when the scales finally dropped from her eyes and she at last realized he'd condemned her to a dark eternity far different than what she'd imagined? He'd seen some of it already, when she'd had to cope with giving up her school, her old friends; Riho the vampire lacked, somehow, that essential joy possessed by Riho the living girl. What if it wasn't just the momentary shock of adjustment, but something permanent she'd lost?

What if it would have been kinder to let her die? Had he done something worse than just kill? The light was temporary and fleeting, the darkness forever. Eternal life was just an eternity of chances to take a wrong step.

V

Toshi positioned the stake carefully, slipping it between two buttons on the vampire's shirt so the point rested against bare flesh. He raised the hammer to swing.

Shido's eyes snapped open and he wrenched the stake away from the boy. A blow from his other hand sent the banger sprawling.

He could be such an idiot sometimes. Centuries of unlife and he still fell into the same stupid traps of thought. Lying there asleep while his subconscious mind argued out whether or not it was worth it to wake up and save himself? It was lucky Guni wasn't there, or he'd never hear the end of his doing something so inane.

"He's awake! What the f-" Shido knocked the second punk sprawling before he could add profanity to his list of sins.

The last of the three stuck his hand into his pocket and came up with a weapon. Not a gun, which was something at least. From the whole wooden-stake routine it was obvious they knew he was a vampire-_how?_-and Shido didn't think he could tolerate the old cliche of the ignorant mortal emptying a gun into the undead.

Not that the silver crucifix was any more productive. Shido snatched it out of his hand and tossed it aside.

"What is this nonsense?" he asked, almost pleasantly.

"Y-you killed Hiro last night. We were gonna make you pay."

The three of them were wearing the same rock-band T-shirts as the kids from the alley. In fact, the one who'd held the stake actually was one of those kids, now that Shido took a second look.

"So it's revenge, then. What a stupid reason to throw away your lives. The night breeds murder and lie, seduce and steal to obtain the light, and you willingly abandon it after less than twenty years."

"Mr. Shido!"

One of the skylights exploded into a rain of glass as Riho plunged through it, playing out her own bloodwhip between her fingers to control her descent. A moment later Yayoi emerged from the shadows with her NOS-issue automatic in hand, its integrated underbarrel light marking out the still-conscious banger.

"Mr. Shido, you're all right!" Riho caroled.

"Really, Shido, I know you're a dedicated detective, but the breed is dead. You _could_ have left this to the police instead of using yourself as bait to round up these lackeys."

"Riho, Yayoi, thank you."

Guni fluttered up.

"What are you thanking them for? We obviously missed all the fun."

"That doesn't matter." And it didn't, really. The fact that he had three people in his life who would come crashing in to save him, risking their own lives, that mattered. "Come on; we've wasted enough time on these people."

"You go on without me," Yayoi said. "I'll call in the NOS to clean up. We know how to deal with those 'Oh, no, he's a vampire!' kind of claims."

"And you should have lots of backup soon; I think you blew through about six speed traps on the way over." Yayoi glared, and Guni dove into her customary hiding place inside Shido's hair.

"All right; we'll meet you back at the office," Shido said, ignoring the by-play. Riho fell into step beside him, and he slipped an arm around her shoulders as they stepped out into the night air.

_Yes, there's darkness within the light,_ he thought, _but you can find a light within the darkness as well. Maybe that's what a "human heart" really means._


End file.
